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small wind Success StoriesCase Studies Small Wind Turbine Stands up to Harsh Utah Wind Regime
Spanish Fork, Utah - At the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, 5 miles east of a Utah town with the same name, the Spanish Fork wind test facility sits directly in the path of high winds spitting out from the steep walled canyon. Here, as a result of this natural outflow point, the high winds make this site one of the windiest locations in the U.S. Sitting at an elevation of 4,800 feet, the Spanish Forks test facility is an ideal location to test how small wind turbines stand up to the uncommon occurrence of extreme wind gusts. The airstreams Spanish Fork Canyon produces on a daily basis are statistically only expected every 50 years at typical sites in other parts of the world The one-and-a-half acre site has long been used to test wind turbines. Within the last 13 years, seven different turbine designs have been tested at the site owned by the City of Spanish Forks, but operated by the Utah Municipal Power Agency. Since the mid 90’s all testing activities at the site have been privately funded. Enter Dean Davis, principal of Windward Engineering of Salt Lake City. In 2000, Dean formed a partnership with the federal Department of Energy, to create an exception to the private funding trend at Spanish Forks. Eighty percent of the cost of installation of the Southwest Windpower Whisper H40 small wind turbine was covered under DOE’s Field Verification Program. The results of the verification program have been significant because performance data from the Whisper H40 is proving that even some of the smallest wind turbines on the market can stand up to brutal weather conditions. The winds are strongest in the early morning around 7 am where the area typically sees winds above 16m/s (35 mph). Storms are the only thing that disrupts this wind pattern and they generate either extreme winds or periods of calm. During the warmer months thunderstorms in the mountains can generate the extreme wind gusts that are of interest for reliability testing of small wind turbines. “The machine has performed extremely well,’ said Davis. After three and a half years of operation, only one diode in the controller and a furl bushing (which has recently been redesigned) had to be replaced. “The Whisper H40 has got to be the quietest machine I’ve ever heard,” Davis said. “If the machine were placed on top of an 80-foot tower, this would be the equivalent to a Class 6 wind site,” concluded Davis. Even sitting on its current 30-foot tower, the machine is still operating in what would be considered a Class 4 site, a premier site that could power a utility-scale wind farm.
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